Wes Anderson is — at least, judging by his films. He misses hand-made objects. Noblesse oblige. Plush travel. Extended families living in big sprawling houses.
Quiet decency, too, and modest bravery — as well as the occasional extravagant, futile gesture.

You can see most of that in his new, delightful "The Grand Budapest Hotel," a rich Viennese pastry of a film which is a salute to a world gone by — not only old, pre-war Europe but old pre-code Hollywood.

Because there is a great sad fondness here not just for the silly royals and luxe style of a teasingly decadent Continent but also for the Coward plays and Lubitsch films that gently mocked them.

Anderson is an epic miniaturist, someone who arranges scenes in tiny boxes but then piles those frames one on top of the other (his favorite camera movement is a tracking shot past a row of train compartments, or a line of rooms or ship's cabins).

In "The Grand Budapest Hotel" though, those boxes are the narrative themselves — as we hear an old writer read a memoir of himself as a young writer, listening to the story of an old man remembering his own tumultuous life as a young man.

The time-honored device of the "unreliable narrator"? This story has several.
What is also has, though, both separating and binding all its layers - like the crème in a Napoleon pastry — is a bittersweet fondness for a magical world gone by, not just in Europe but Hollywood as well, in the days before not just computers but censors.

So while Anderson delights in creating a fictional (but very real) mittel-Europe, he also does it with the craft of old Hollywood, using carefully made miniatures and handpainted backdrops. And creating a hero who would start getting blue-pencilled out of scripts by the mid-`30s.

His Monsieur Gustave — played with great and uncharacteristic lightness by Ralph Fiennes - is both a horrible social snob and a true sexual democrat, finding pleasure in everyone (although elderly women are a particular specialty).

Is he a gigolo? Is he gay? Oh darling, that is so besides the point. Let's just call him a gourmand.

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Fiennes — who long has had a tendency toward the self-tortured — is marvelous as the fussy hotelier, whose absurd affectations (he's particularly fond of one cologne, "L'air de Panache") only disguise a very real core of honor.

And it is one he is going to have to rely on, as he and his young bellboy protégé find themselves living in a darkening world of murdered aristocrats, marching fascists and assorted prisoners, assassins and murderers.

Scored to mostly classical music, crammed full of real European detail, the movie is a very carefully wrought work of art - and, like all of Anderson's work, sometimes that exactitude can feel a little chilly, a bit overly precise. You may find yourself yearning for a little less formalism, a bit more rough and raw emotion.

And yet, in the end, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" does deliver a strong feeling, and it's the same one all of Anderson's best movies do. And it's not anger or lust or even simple giddy joy. It's a far subtler, perhaps wiser mood that that. And it's simple, wistful, regret — for a youth now gone, and a world gone by.

Ratings note: The film contains some strong language and violence.

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' (R) Fox Searchlight (99 min.)
Directed by Wes Anderson. With Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham. Now playing in New York; opens in New Jersey March 14.